The press silenced, Nuevo Laredo tries to find voice

You don't notice it at first. Not with the people seemingly moving as normal
on the sidewalks and the happy recorded music blaring across the plaza in front
of city hall to announce the annual cowboy parade. No, at first Nuevo Laredo
looks like a regular border town, until the military armored car goes by a
block away and rotates the heavy machine gun toward the plaza. Are the soldiers
just curious? Or do they see something they want to shoot? Who will be hit if
they do open fire? Then other images come into focus, like the blocks of closed
shops, with for sale signs only on the most recently closed because the owners
of the older, more dilapidated shops, have given up even that hope.

U.S. tourists who used to be so important to business don't come because it is too
dangerous. A saleswoman in a nearly empty jewelry shop said, "We have learned
to live in a war. But it's like no one is on our side." She would only give her
first name: Amalia. She was scared to be interviewed because the cartel could
be watching. It has lookouts everywhere, she said. So when she spoke about
something as dangerous as whether she felt safe she looked down at the floor. People
said the police used to work for the cartel, but in June the mayor disbanded
the police on the grounds that they were hopelessly corrupted by the Zeta
cartel. Last month state officials said one quarter of the state police--2,500 officers--had
been fired for failing or refusing to take evaluation tests.

The army came into Nuevo Laredo, and the federal police, to
replace city officers. But residents said there aren't many of them and they
only do patrols and don't investigate crimes. "If someone kills my mother or
robs my store maybe there will be a report taken, but it will stop there," Amalia
said.

The war is between the federal police and the army on one
side and the Zetas on the other. But the armed men that control this town are
the Zetas, people told CPJ. The army fights them, with civilians running for
cover, but the Zetas, using death threats often carried out, get what they want
from the people, residents told me.

Wars are strange. I've covered many. A wartime city can look
pretty normal at first. The city of Nablus, on the West Bank, while under the
guns of the Israeli army, could bustle with apparent unconcern. Israelis in West
Jerusalem, while threatened by Palestinian suicide bombers, took crowded buses
to work and ate at sidewalk cafes. People in Sarajevo during the bloody siege
took pride in pretending not to notice, even when the death toll was very high.
And Nuevo Laredo was having a cowboy parade, even if people lived looking at
the floor, like Amalia. That's the kind of war it is, with two armed sides
fighting and the civilians hiding and dying along with them, according to
reporters in town.

It's a world under a
Zeta dome, residents said. The cartel ships narcotics north across the border--Texas
is across four bridges over the Rio Grande, three in the city and one nearby. This
city is at the northern end of one of the most important highways in Mexico and
the southern end of one of the main U.S. entry points to Mexico. According to
the Laredo Development Foundation, a business group on the Texas side, the
crossing here is the busiest anywhere along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year,
there was an average of about 8,000 trucks going north or south each day on the
four bridges, according to the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise
development. The drugs go north, the guns and cash come south to the Zetas.

The Zetas are the only group that sells drugs in this city
of about 360,000. And the only one that openly robs, extorts, and kidnaps. All
to great profit, journalists said, since the victims are so afraid and the
operations belong to the Zetas alone. Kidnappings and extortion are a big part
of the reason the stores are closed, residents said, because businesses can't
afford to make the payoffs anymore.

It seems that all information about the war against them
belongs to the Zetas also. Journalists said they cannot report a thing that
might upset the Zetas without the serious risk of being killed. And, they say,
since the Zetas don't want anything reported, nothing about them is reported.
Not in the papers, or on TV or radio.

So, for the most part, there are no stories about what most affects
the people in Nuevo Laredo. There are no stories about the war or the Zetas or
the army or the police. There are also no stories about the Zetas' businesses
of retail drug sales in town or their kidnapping and extortion of residents,
according to journalists.

In other areas in
Mexico where organized crime has its hands around the throat of the press, reporters can often rely on something, perhaps
something not accurate, but something from the police or local government or
the army. They can usually get some statement with a detail or obfuscation. An
official statement allows them to publish at least what the government says.
And usually, the criminals don't complain too much about that. (Often they
control the police or the government body issuing the statement in the first
place.) But in Nuevo Laredo, reporters said, they normally don't even get a
government press release, not even a return phone call. So having no official
statement, and fearful of offending the Zetas if they say something wrong, they
say nothing.

At 10:41 on a recent Saturday morning, Jaime Orozco came up
to the short step at the door of a restaurant in downtown Nuevo Laredo and
stopped his wheelchair. A friend helped him over and he rolled to a table where
reporters gather and ordered eggs a la Mexicana, with chopped onions and
tomatoes. Asked about the pressures on journalists in the city to hide the
truth, he said, "Anyone who dares publish or broadcast the truth about the
cartel or the fight against the cartel is a condemned person." As if the judgment
of a man who was paralyzed in a grenade
and assault-rifle attack against the city's main newspaper five years ago
needed further emphasis, two other reporters, in unison, ran their fingers
across their throats. As a measure of the fear among people here, none of the 12
journalists and six of the seven others I spoke with wanted me to use their
names, except Orozco. Even in the jewelry store, when Amalia gave me a name, I
doubted it was true.

The motive for the attack on Orozco's newspaper, El Mañana, was never clear, he said. That
left the matter all the more sinister and the impact greater because one ever
knew how to guard against another attack. He said, "If you don't know what you
can't do then you don't do anything."

Orozco was shot in February of 2006. Two months later, Dolores
García Escamilla, who was a radio reporter covering the crime beat, was murdered
in the parking lot of her station as she left work. Reporters in Nuevo
Laredo said none of the attacks have been solved. Orozco said that the city's
press was cowed before the attacks but that afterwards even less crime news was
covered. Nowadays, those journalists who remain on the crime beat confine
themselves to reporting bar fights, stabbings, car accidents or other minor
incidents that produce good pictures, but nothing that threatens to go beyond
the street.

When Garcia Escamilla was murdered, the Gulf cartel was in
charge of Nuevo Laredo and the Zetas were their loyal gunmen. But the Zetas
pulled away, first by running their own smuggling and crime networks, according
to a senior U.S. official, and then trying to take over all of this state,
Tamaulipas, as well as large areas in the rest of Mexico. By early 2010 there
were large, sometimes daily gunfights in Tamaulipas, often in the main cities.
But the press almost always was forced by the two cartels to not report the
battles, reporters have told me. There's a lull now, or maybe the fight's over.
Nuevo Laredo is under Zeta control, and the Zetas always had a reputation for
more violence and less tolerance for the press than the Gulf cartel, according
to reporters here. That meant that as bad as it had been, things got much
worse, journalists said. Now there's no room for movement or mistakes.

In this vacuum, ordinary people began to provide their own
kind of news, beginning about two years ago, according to reporters. It started
as telephone trees where friends and family members warned one another about
rumors of gunfights near schools. Usually, reporters said, the rumors were
wrong and people panicked and rushed to take their children out of school
because of false alarms. But because there were often real gunfights in the
city between the army and the Zetas that were never reported in the press,
people were ready for the worst. The "news" soon transferred to social media
like Twitter and Facebook, but did not improve in reliability, according to the
reporters. However, they said, people learned not to react so quickly. Then, a
little over a year ago, according to journalists, a website appeared to which
residents began posting their warnings. It is Nuevo Laredo en Vivo (Nuevo Laredo Live). At some point -- when
is a matter of discussion, but probably in the last few months -- its content
evolved from the usual warnings to also being the place where residents would
anonymously post complaints about criminal activity. That's when everything
changed, because, journalists told me, it became a threat to the Zeta cartel.
For instance, people were afraid to reveal themselves by telling the
authorities about suspected Zeta safe houses--where they might be holding kidnapping
victims-- or places where Zeta gunmen were living or where Zetas were selling
drugs, but an anonymous post on the Nuevo
Laredo Live website seemed safe. In a city where the police had all been
fired, and where the press could not do its job, the website became the way
citizens could report the Zetas to the Army and the federal police, which,
however ineptly, may be trying to replace the local police.

In fact, the website has the feel of belonging to the
federal government, and many reporters said they believe it does. There are
logos and phone numbers of the army and navy and the federal police all over the
site, with pleas to anonymously report suspicions either through text messages,
phone calls, or emails. Still, no one I spoke with could point with certainty
to who is behind the website. The Mexican Ministry of Defense would not comment
on whether the military was involved with the website.

But it does seem to be really angering the Zetas. On
September 13,the mutilated bodies of a man and a woman hanging from a bridge in
Nuevo Laredo were found with a note apparently signed by the cartel that warned
against reporting on social media, according to news reports. The victims have
not been identified publicly and there is no known connection between them and Nuevo Laredo Live, but that may be
beside the point. The Zetas may have been only trying to terrorize, using
victims they killed for other reasons.

But then there was the next step. For the first time, CPJ found
that someone was murdered directly for posting on social media. On September
25, the decapitated body of a woman
was left in the city with what seemed to be another note from the cartel.
Gruesomely, her head was left nearby with headphones, close to a computer
keyboard. The message read in part, "O.K Nuevo Laredo Live and social media, I
am the Girl from Laredo and I am here because of my reports and yours."

Local journalists told me the victim was María
Elizabeth Macías Castro, 39, who they said helped moderate the Nuevo Laredo Live site using the
nickname La NenaDLaredo (The Girl from Laredo). They said her family has now
fled to Texas. I couldn't find the family to corroborate her association with
the website, nor could I find anyone associated with the site. But as if to
substantiate what the journalists said, the site ran a eulogy for her and now
has a forum in her name. Several years ago, Macías worked at El Mañana, the paper where Jaime Orozco
was paralyzed in an attack, journalists said. And, they said, when she was
murdered she was working for another local paper, Primera Hora. At both papers she may have very occasionally written
stories, but her main jobs were on the administrative side, they said. Neither
paper would comment about her.

There was a fourth murder. An unidentified man was left, decapitated,
on November 9 at the same place Macías´ body was left. Journalists said there
was another message apparently from the Zetas near the body saying the man had
been killed for posting on social networks. Nuevo
Laredo Live, however, denied that the victim was a contributor, according
to a story in the on-line newspaper Animal Politico. In other words, once
again, the Zetas could have used a victim killed for some other reason to
scare people away from Nuevo Laredo
Live.

Normally homicides are investigated by the state, but the
spokesman for the Tamauplipas state Attorney General's office, Rubén Darío Ríos
López, said he had no information on these four cases because they had been
taken over by the regional office of the federal attorney general. López said
he didn't know why. A spokesman for the regional attorney general's office, who
would not give his name, said there was never federal involvement in the
investigations. So, it seems there is no investigation at all.

The test now is whether the killings have scared away
anonymous posts. Will people in Nuevo Laredo once again be without any voice at
all? For the moment it doesn't seem so. Several journalists said they thought
the army might be beginning to do better against the Zetas and that tips from Nuevo Laredo Live could be helping. But
then since reporters don't dare investigate even something as basic as whether
a tip led to an arrest, they can't be sure - it's only an opinion. Today, there
are still reports of crimes or suspicious events going up on Nuevo Laredo Live. We'll never know if
there are fewer reports than there would have been without the deaths.

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